The Italian Resistance in Historical Transition:
Class War, Patriotic War or Civil War?

Michael Kelly

(University of Melbourne)

At the end of April 1945, victorious Allied troops
finally forced their way into the north of Italy after months of
stalemate in the Apennine mountains of central Italy. To their surprise,
they found not German troops in command of the major towns and cities
of northern Italy, but Italian partisans. The forces of the Italian
Resistance were in a seemingly impregnable position of power: they
had emerged victoriously from an eighteen-month-long armed struggle
against the German occupying army and Fascist Republic of Salò.
They had liberated the towns and cities of the north; they had successfully
protected the northern industrial infrastructure from destruction
at the hands of the Germans; and they had installed Committees of
National Liberation (CLN) throughout the north. These committees
controlled local government, industrial production, and public utilities,
instigating the purging of Fascists from government bureaucracy and
private industry. Within a month of the Allied breakthrough their
leaders would be installed in power heading a government of national
unity under the leadership of the Action Party's (PdA) Ferruccio
Parri.

While the military
contribution of the Italian Resistance is generally recognised by
most historians, this is not to state that the historiographical
debate surrounding Italian Fascism, the Resistance and their respective
historical roles is without interest to historians of Italy. On the
contrary, the discussion has not only been heated and bitter but
also highly politicised. Without an understanding of this historiographical
debate, it is impossible to place the role of the partisan movement
in the general context of Italian history. The debate has been characterised,
from the early post-war period until the present day, by transitory
fluctuation. This fluctuation has always been linked, however, to
the question of ideological possession of a politically useable reconstruction
of the past. Ownership of the Resistance - and thus of the Italian
past and present - was, and is, at the heart of the historiographical
debate. In general, it is possible to isolate three key groupings
in the historiography: the liberals, the Marxists, and the conservative
school centred on Renzo De Felice. Among these schools the Resistance
has been defined as a revolutionary movement; a patriotic war of
national unity; and simply as a civil war in which neither side could
claim the moral high ground. The debate has underlined the transitory
nature of historical study and, in particular, the political uses
of the past and its reconstruction.

Immediately
after the fall of Fascism in 1945, two of these schools emerged:
the liberals and the Marxists. The liberals argued that liberal Italy
was not the root of Fascism - rather it seemed to them to have originated
in World War One and revolutionism (particularly that inspired by
the Bolsheviks). The Marxists argued that Fascism was instead the
'revelation' of Italian history and that post-1945 Italy
was not necessarily exorcised of Fascism.[1]

In any evaluation of the liberal wing of Italian historiography,
Benedetto Croce is the key writer.[2] One could define him as
a self-interested liberal (along with others) who defended his own
social grouping against charges of responsibility for the rise of
Fascism.[3] Croce developed his theory of
Fascism as a 'parenthesis' in Italian history - an anomaly
which began in the 1920s and ended in 1943-44: a movement outside
the 'normal', healthy historical development of the nation,
a movement ended by war and the Resistance.[4]

A key element of this liberal vision was a distinct anti-Communism.
It fed on internal politics and the developing Cold War in Europe.

As early as 1959, Denis Mack Smith - then regarded as the
pre-eminent foreign scholar of modern Italy - evaluated the situation
in his Italy: A Modern History. Foremost in
Mack Smith's thinking was a pronounced anti-Communism and a propensity
to see the war in Italy as a civil war.[5]
Mack Smith believed that the primary cause of the civil war that
commenced with the fall of Fascism in 1943 was the rescue of Mussolini
by German troops on 12 September 1943.[6] In conjunction with some
support amongst Italians for a continued Fascist state, Mack Smith
believed that Mussolini's escape from Ponza 'launch[ed] their
country into a civil war.'[7]

Mack
Smith described the war itself between the Resistance and the Republic
of Salò as 'a growing fever of terroristic reprisal and counterreprisal.'[8]
Furthermore, as the war neared its conclusion, political purging
in Italy proved easier than in France; Fascism had tainted almost
everyone in Italy and, therefore, discrimination between degrees
of complicity was less important.[9] This theme was taken up
by historians of the 1980s and 1990s.[10]

Overall,
Mack Smith saw the partisans as a mixed blessing. They restored morale
to Italy, but gave the Communists a disproportionate influence in
local government and the electoral machinery. They also injected
bitterness into Italian social relations, promoting disrespect for
the law and increasing class tensions. Mack Smith accused the partisans
of 'violent and summary measures'. 'Liberation' was
an excuse for personal vendettas.[11] Mack Smith did, however,
credit the partisans with saving Italian industrial infrastructure
from the Germans, greatly assisting the post-war return to prosperity.[12]

The liberal tradition survived beyond the early
Cold War. In 1972 John Clarke Adams and Paolo Barile released The
Government of Republican Italy. Adams and Barile presented
an account of the theory and practice of the Italian Republic in
the context of a self-confessed liberal democratic outlook.[13]
To them, the Constitution was the core of the Republic. Its foundations
were in the Resistance, which gave Italy the moral purging necessary
to place the nation amongst civilised nations once again.[14]
This echoed Croce's vision of Fascism as a 'parenthesis'
in Italian history: a parenthesis closed by the Resistance.

The legitimacy of the Resistance (and implicitly the new
Republic) was founded on the 200,000 Italians who fought in the Resistance
and the other 200,000 engaged in their support. This support was
spontaneous and more than 100,000 partisans and civilians died in
the struggle, making their losses greater than Allied losses throughout
the entire Italian campaign.[15] In the eyes of Adams
and Barile, the Resistance was, in effect, the fulfilment of the
Risorgimento (the nineteenth century movement
for the unification of Italy) - a struggle for liberty and justice
- but unlike the Risorgimento, it was popular
and a mass movement, not an elitist enterprise.[16]
The liberal notion of the Resistance as a truly national enterprise
was restated. It was not limited to class war or civil war, but was
part of the movement of the Italian national project, begun with
the Risorgimento and continued by all progressive
political forces.

The second strand in the historiography
of the Resistance was distinctly Marxist. Among the first of such
works was Roberto Battaglia's 1953 publication, Storia
della resistenza italiana(History of the Italian
Resistance). Battaglia, an ex-Giustizia e Libertà
(Justice and Liberty) partisan, linked the 1943 industrial strikes
in northern Italy to a loss of faith in the Fascist regime amongst
the masses.[17] The proletariat, for him,
was one of the key players in the Resistance. He also asserted that
the Republic of Salò had no popular base.[18]
Battaglia saw the pro-Resistance forces as generally united; Communists
had played a major role in the Resistance, but the real driving force
was patriotism.[19] The Resistance had redeemed
lost Italian honour.[20] Ironically, Battaglia
mirrored the liberal position in certain ways: both stressed the
patriotic, nationalist nature of the Resistance.

Battaglia
inaugurated what came to be known as the 'myth of the Resistance'
which would dominate the 1960s.[21] It began with American
Charles Delzell's Mussolini's Enemies: the Italian
Anti-Fascist Resistance in 1961. Delzell, like liberal
Italian historians, identified the armed Resistance as the 'Second
Risorgimento' and the crucial element in the making of the new
democratic Republic.[22] Communist historians
also continued to propagate the myth of the Resistance throughout
the decade: Paolo Spriano, Renato Zangheri, Giuliano Procacci and
Giorgio Amendola all made key contributions. Anti-Fascism dominated
their histories emphasising the Italian Communists (PCI) as natural
leaders of a Resistance with a genuine mass base that embraced other
political factions.[23] Typical of these histories
was Giuliano Procacci's 1968 work, History of the Italian
People. In his chapter covering the war and post-war period,
Procacci followed a Marxist interpretation of the Resistance and
its impact on post-war Italy. For Procacci, the basis for the anti-Fascist
struggle was laid down by the proletarians of Parma, Rome, the old
quarter of Bari - and especially in the Turin strikes of August 1922.[24]

According to Procacci, the Communists, who advocated
propaganda, agitation and strikes within Italy, were the true core
of the Resistance. They alone maintained militants within Italy,
particularly in Turin, Tuscany and Venezia-Giulia. They also developed
the deepest analysis of the Fascist victory in Italy and, through
Antonio Gramsci, advocated a worker-peasant bloc to oppose the industrial-agrarian
bloc that Fascism represented.[25]

In
September 1943 partisan units had begun to form. The first partisan
bands were formed by Communists and the Action Party but were soon
joined by autonomous groups led by regular army officers following
Prime Minister Pietro Badoglio's declaration of war on Germany
in October 1943.[26] Worried about the political
implications of the Resistance, the Allies wanted a force auxiliary
to their military requirements, but - Allied control of the flow
of arms to specific partisan groups, and military declarations for
demobilisation such as the Alexander Proclamation notwithstanding
- failed to limit the Resistance to this.[27]
The Resistance, in fact - in the opinion of Procacci - was not merely
a military force, but a wide political movement: a movement that
expressed national regeneration and rejected political transformism.
It was a movement of workers, fighters, peasants and even priests.[28]

Procacci
believed that following the war Italians refused to assess the reality
that had befallen Italy during Fascism. This led to a withdrawal
from the change and innovation that the Resistance offered - by politicians
and public alike - and led to the politically reactionary movement
known as qualunquismo.[29]
In this environment, the forces of conservatism and privilege -
although initially isolated following the liberation - found consensus
and a mass base through the Christian Democrat Party (DC) and managed
to retain their traditional dominance.[30]
The DC thus won the support of the forces of conservatism but also
of other Italians fearful of Communism.[31]

Procacci was convinced that the unity of the
Resistance was swept away by the Cold War.[32]
The workers, peasants and intellectuals who had struggled for a
new order during the Resistance were therefore faced with two choices
in the post-war era: unrewarding hard struggle or resignation.[33]

The 1970s saw the PCI propose an image of the
Resistance as a 'popular front' of all progressive forces
united in the struggle against Fascism. This was, in fact, the restatement
of Comintern policy. By the mid-seventies the defence of anti-Fascism
had become a northern Italian cause (particularly at the University
of Turin with Guido Quazza and Nicola Tranfaglia as driving forces).
Quazza and Tranfaglia rejected Croce's 'parenthesis'
theory, noting the survival of Fascist forms into the new Republic.[34]

By the 1990s the 'myth of the Resistance'
was under constant attack from more conservative historians, primarily
based in Rome and led by Renzo De Felice. In particular, the morality
of the Resistance was itself under scrutiny.[35]
The Left in turn moved to a more defensive posture, and was simultaneously
forced to make concessions to the conservatives. In 1990 historian
Paul Ginsborg published his book entitled A History of
Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988. In
his chapters concerning the Resistance and the period of post-war
reconstruction, Ginsborg highlighted not only the sense of unity
of action of the various anti-Fascist parties, but also the strategic
weakness of policies conducted by the Communists. For Ginsborg, Italian
workers were again the first to show opposition to the Fascist regime.
On 5 March 1943 there were strikes at the Rasetti factory in Turin
and also at FIAT Mirafiori. They began as a protest against workers'
conditions but soon took on a somewhat political tone, spreading
throughout Turin and the north, eventually involving over 100,000
workers. In April, employers and the government were forced to grant
concessions.[36] The working class also led
the resistance to the Republic of Salò and the Germans. In March
1944 more strikes erupted, this time political in nature. In the
province of Milan alone, 300,000 workers went out on strike and they
were brutally repressed.[37] In contrast, considerable
sections of the petit bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie continued to
support Mussolini in the north.[38] Most industrialists,
however, played a double game when it became apparent that the Axis
would lose the war. Vittorio Valletta, managing director of FIAT,
for example, assisted the Allies in limiting production but did little
to save the anti-Fascist militants at FIAT. In 1945 an English officer
saved him from partisan justice.[39] Ginsborg, therefore,
underlined the class nature of the anti-Fascist struggle. One major
effect of the war was, thus, the recomposition of working class solidarity
that had been undermined during the Fascist period.[40]
Critically, and controversially, however, Ginsborg claimed that
another effect was civil war, even amongst the working class itself,
as working class families with differing allegiances settled old
scores and waged vendettas.[41]

The
arrival of German troops in the north was the critical factor that
created a new spirit of resistance, although, according to Ginsborg,
in a very restricted minority of the population.[42]
The newly founded government of Salò was no more than a figurehead
for the Germans. In fact, it was the Germans who controlled northern
Italy.[43] The beginnings of Nazi rule
thus prompted the Resistance. In the early days of this anti-Fascist
Resistance, the Communists of the Garibaldi
brigades were the vanguard, making up more than seventy per cent
of all partisans.[44] While underlining Communist
leadership, Ginsborg conceded that the early partisan bands were
very mixed, with some members fighting for ideological reasons, others
to escape the call-up of the Republic of Salò, some ex-POWs and
radical middle class youths and workers escaping persecution.[45]
Ginsborg believed that despite brutal German retaliatory actions,
such as the massacre at Boves in September 1943, the movement grew
to 20,000-30,000 members by spring 1944.[46]
The great number of Communists in the Resistance, however, worried
the Allies. The Allies, therefore - especially the British - wanted
to minimise the role of the Resistance and to guarantee that no unforeseen
political consequences emerged from partisan action, as had been
the case in Greece and Yugoslavia.[47]

Importantly,
Ginsborg negated the revolutionary aspect of the Resistance, seeing
it instead as a reformist, unitary movement. Ginsborg asserted that
the 'turning-point of Salerno,' where the Communist Party
abandoned revolutionary action - favouring instead a policy of national
unity, progressive democracy and a lasting coalition of the mass
popular parties - was neither original nor taken autonomously. Rather,
the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti followed the broad ideas of
the Comintern's seventh congress in July 1935.[48]
Soviet military needs were also to be accommodated: the PCI could
not risk souring relations with the Allies at a time when the USSR
vitally needed military relief from its allies.[49]
Togliatti also saw a revolutionary struggle as impossible given
that Allied forces occupied Italy.[50] Togliatti's ideas
were reinforced by decades of defeat for the Italian Communist movement.[51]
Togliatti adopted and adapted Gramsci's concept of a 'war
of position,' where the struggle for working class hegemony over
civil society would precede the insurrectionary struggle. He emphasised
not only social alliances from the bottom up, but political alliances
from the top down, of which the alliance with the DC would become
the most difficult. Furthermore, he envisaged a very wide social
alliance that would include much of the ceti medi,
or Italian middle classes.[52]

In
a positive vein, Ginsborg commended the PCI strategy as it avoided
the decimation of the Communist movement in Italy, as outright revolution
would have led to Allied intervention. The PCI's commitment to
unity also strengthened the Resistance and placed the party at the
centre of national politics.[53] The strategy of national
unity, however, came to supplant all other policies concerning social
and institutional reform. At the height of partisan and workers'
power, the Resistance squandered its leading role and left the field
open for its opponents to manoeuvre for position. The Allies and
conservative forces, therefore, were able to outflank the Communists
completely.[54] In this sense, PCI recognition
of the government of Pietro Badoglio, and, therefore, the legitimacy
of the King, began the process of the 'continuity of the state'
that would see a conservation of all anti-reform elements in the
state bureaucracy.[55]

Ginsborg
concluded that although the development of the DC into a mass party
and the Allied military presence in Italy might have made revolution
very unlikely, it could not block social reform. But, according to
Ginsborg, the unrepeatable opportunities for revolutionary change,
which the Resistance offered, were unfortunately squandered. The
Allies and the conservative forces were partly to blame for this,
but responsibility also rested with the left-wing parties, and, in
particular, the PCI. Their policy of national unity, above all else,
and their decision to await a future date for reform meant that such
reform would never occur.[56]

Within
the Marxist school, Claudio Pavone's Una guerra civile
(A Civil War) of 1991 was another in a line
of works asserting that the armed Resistance was at the same time
a patriotic, civil and class war, thereby refuting the theories of
the more conservative historians who attempted to portray the Resistance
as a civil war in which the values of the competing forces were irrelevant.[57]
This defensive posture against the conservative historians culminated
in the publication of E Abele uccise Caino (And
Abel Killed Cain) by Ezio Maria Simini in 2000, a work
which attempted to justify the morality of the Resistance in the
context of civil war.[58]

Renzo
De Felice led the conservative force that had placed the Marxists
in such a defensive position. De Felice argued that the Communists
could make no claim to a useable anti-Fascist past: they could not
claim to have led the Resistance.[59] In fact, the Resistance
was better termed a 'civil war,' following which, the anti-Fascists,
led by the Communists, had destroyed Italian national identity through
disseminating an anti-history of falsity and myth, preventing Italy's
spiritual reconstruction.[60] De Felice and his school
believed that the problem with modern Italy was a lack of (good)
nationalism, which had been evident since the fall of Fascism.[61]
De Felice defined this nationalism simply as 'science' or
'truth.' In fact, in his own mind, De Felice was himself
a 'scientific,' 'objective' historian. The implication
was that other historians who challenged his interpretation of Fascism
and anti-Fascism, particularly those of Marxist persuasions, were
inferior, as they did not apply a 'scientific' or 'objective'
analysis.[62]

De Felice's
attack on the anti-Fascist interpretation of the past, particularly
following his 1975 interview with Michael Ledeen 'Intervista
sul fascismo' ('Interview on Fascism'),[63]
polarised the historiography of Fascism. Even moderates were drawn
into this polarised debate: a debate which saw a greater emphasis
on criticism of the Resistance, and in particular, the Communists.
In 1984, Martin Clark published Modern Italy, 1871-1982
. Clark stressed that of all the political groups of the Resistance,
the Communists were the main motivators and beneficiaries. The Garibaldini
(Communist partisans) made up sixty per cent of all partisans and
Communists who agitated for strikes, higher wages and threatened
employers.[64] The secretary of the party,
Togliatti, was cautious. Not wanting to see a repetition in Italy
of the British military action which was taking place in Greece against
Communist partisans, and desirous of American economic aid, he decided
not to use the Resistance as a force for revolution. He preferred
to remain a part of the anti-Fascist establishment.[65]
Clark maintained that while the Resistance made a far from negligible
military contribution, the true effects of its work were political.
The partisans prevented a unilateral Allied-imposed post-war political
settlement, and achieved a new national unity based on anti-Fascist
terms. The Communists benefited most, gaining legitimacy in Italy
thanks to their major contribution to the Resistance.[66]
The Resistance, however, had been a 'primitive' popular
rebellion with no united political or social program and no outstanding
leader. Clark saw the early partisan movement as a local, rather
than national, spontaneous popular uprising that was often of an
anti-State nature rather than specifically anti-Fascist.[67]
In fact, some partisan groups, particularly the early bands, were
outsiders who operated as outlaws and even terrorised the local peasants.[68]
Nevertheless, the Resistance achieved surprising results.[69]
There were, however, some unfortunate implications for the future
in the victory of the Resistance: the movement had been far less
revolutionary and united than later believed and certain unpleasant
aspects of political violence could be attached to the 'values
of the Resistance.' One such aspect concerned the purging of
Fascists by the political wing of the Resistance, the Committees
for National Liberation - an activity labelled 'murder' by
Clark.[70] Finally, Clark saw the Resistance
as primarily a northern experience, the south being relatively uninvolved.[71]

By the early 1990s the criticism of the 'myth
of the Resistance' intensified. Journalistic campaigns such as
the 'triangolo della morte' ('triangle
of death'), attacking the alleged crimes of Communist partisans
against civilians in Emilia-Romagna abounded in the Italian press.[72]
At the same time, although unconnected to the 'triangle of death'
campaign, historians such as Roger Absalom claimed that most Italians
did not want to join the armed struggle, nor participate in political
upheavals, simply preferring an end to trouble.[73]
In contrast to the conventional historical interpretation, Absalom
believed that the mass of the population supported the liberation
movement only in the sense that to survive was itself to resist.[74]
This peasant ambivalence to the Resistance had several causes. First,
Absalom suggested that relations between partisans and peasants were
often bad following intensive military activity and the German reprisals
which followed.[75] Secondly, partisan behaviour
towards peasant property increased tension between the two groups.
Absalom claimed that by September 1944 there was widespread peasant
ambivalence to the Resistance throughout the north, owing to the
indiscriminate requisitioning of produce by partisan groups.[76]
Finally, Absalom argued that although the peasants hated both Germans
and Fascists, their relationship with the partisans was still problematic.
While they gave symbolic support to the partisans, the interests
and perceptions of the Resistance fighters and politicians had always
clashed with those of the peasantry. The partisans, particularly
the leadership, were generally urban orientated and did not reflect
the peasants' concerns with the local milieu of village life.[77]
Absalom even saw the support of factory workers for the Resistance
as problematic. The March 1943 strikes in Turin, Genoa and Milan
of one million workers were spontaneous and, although they quickly
turned from being economically motivated to an anti-war statement,
they were in no way inspired or controlled by the Communist precursor
of the Resistance. The strike of June 1944 was, however, anti-German
as was that of April 1945 directed by the Resistance. Before 1945,
however, factory workers were not simply a tool of the Resistance.[78]
Finally, Absalom stressed the existence of major divisions and tensions
within the Resistance movement itself.[79]

This 'anti-anti-Fascist' argument became
particularly evident in 1997 with the publication of De Felice's
final section of his biography of Mussolini, Mussolini
l'alleato 1940-1945
II. La guerra civile 1943-1945 (Mussolini
the Ally 1940-1945 II. The Civil War 1943-1945). De Felice
advanced the case of the school of 'Resistance as civil war.'
He argued that the competing parties in the 'civil war' could
not be separated morally:[80] to him, the Communist
partisans represented the USSR, not a popular Italian mass
base, while the Salò militia represented German interests.[81]
Ordinary Italians had remained uncommitted and simply wished for
an end to the war.[82] Thus, it seemed there
was no moral distinction between the warring parties during the final
stages of the Second World War in Italy, only vying sectional interests.

De Felice went on to emphasise the distinction between
Fascism and Nazism. He claimed that the Italo-German alliance was
tactical rather than ideological, and that Fascism bore no responsibility
for the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes.[83]
Finally, the commitment of De Felice and his heir apparent, Emilio
Gentile,[84] to a 'de-politicised'
history (which was implicit in their 'scientific' method)
had failed: it did not lead to a rational, apolitical examination
of the past, but, as historian Richard Bosworth has pointed out,
instead spawned only an 'anti-anti-Fascist' orthodoxy.[85]
The outcome of the De Felicean-dominated 1990s was, therefore, a
revisionism in which the crimes of Fascism were ignored in favour
of a critique of the failings of anti-Fascism.[86]

The historiographical debate over the meaning
of the Italian Resistance underlines both the transitory nature of
the historical study of the movement, and the political and ideological
desire to possess the past and its reconstruction. There have been
shifts in interpretation over time, but crucially these have been
associated with changing political-ideological positions. From the
early post-war period liberals and Marxists acted and reacted in
order to project a useable historical reconstruction. Both schools
adopted the concept of the Resistance as a unified national war of
liberation, though for different motives. The liberals needed to
stress their link to the anti-Fascist movement in order to deflect
criticism that associated them with the rise of Fascism. The Marxists
instead developed the concept as a response to the PCI's rejection
of revolutionary insurrection that began with the 'turning-point
of Salerno.' At the same time, it was crucial to highlight the
role of the proletariat in the Resistance and the leadership of the
PCI. This became particularly important with the rise of the De Felicean
school and its concept of 'Resistance as civil war.' De Felice's
criticism of the 'myth of the Resistance' undermined the
moral integrity of the Resistance, and thus implicitly of the PCI.
For the Marxists it became necessary to insist
on the national and unifying nature of the struggle, even as concessions
- such as the possibility of Resistance as class war, national liberation
and civil war - were made. De Felice's theories
were themselves to become instrumentalised during the 1990s. As the
political mood in Italy shifted distinctly to the centre-right, political
forces such as Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia
and Gianfranco Fini's neo-right Alleanza Nazionale
found it useful to incorporate a vision of the past in which the
Communists were not seen as the moral guardians of national rebirth,
and the forces of the Republic of Salò were to an extent rehabilitated.
After all, they represented merely one side in a civil war in which
no moral distinction could be made. The key, therefore, to understanding
the transitory nature of the historiographical debate over the Resistance
is its link to the ideological possession of a politically useable
reconstruction of the past.

[84] See
for example Gentile's support of De Felice in Emilio Gentile,
'Fascism in Italian Historiography: In Search of an Individual
Historical Identity,' Journal of Contemporary History
, 21, 1986, pp. 183-84. Back